This report, drawing on previous Institute for Government reports, highlights the four areas that offer the greatest opportunity for the new UK Government to ensure that its fiscal policy best helps deliver its priorities and ends by setting out how these could be enacted in legislation.

Some of the most enduring reforms made by UK Chancellors have been to the structures that support economic policymaking and announced early on in the life of a new government – from Gordon Brown’s granting independence to the Bank of England in 1997 to George Osborne’s creation of the Office for Budget responsibility in 2010.

The reforms that the new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has already proposed, could be similarly transformative.

Key recommendations

• Improve the fiscal rules
• Make tax policy more strategic
• Use a multiyear spending review to tackle deep-seated problems
• Reform the mandate and powers of the Office for Budget Responsibility